Code of Conduct

A huge thanks to Pear Conf, whose code of conduct inspired ours. Our byline, harassment examples, and examples of what we won’t act on all come from their code of conduct.

PromptConf prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort.

Therefore, we do not tolerate harassment of our attendees or participants, at the conference venue or outside of it, online or offline.

Harassment includes:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment
• Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they’re not appropriate
• Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g. textual descriptions like “hug” or “back rub”) without consent or after a request to stop
• Threats of violence
• Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
• Deliberate intimidation
• Stalking or following
• Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
• Sustained disruption of discussion
• Unwelcome sexual attention
• Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
• Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease
• Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse
• Publication of non-harassing private communication

We will not act on complaints regarding:

• ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
• Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you”
• Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
• Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting Violations

Please bring any concerns to the immediate attention of the event staff. You can send information about code of conduct violations to the organizers by emailing organizers@promptconf.com.

All code of conduct violations are handled immediately upon receipt by a dedicated team. First, the team will ask you whether you would feel safe if they were to address the person you’re reporting with the information you have provided. Why: although the team always makes their best effort to anonymize report information, sometimes it’s impossible to anonymize a report due to the specificity of what the violator did. If you do not want the team to address the violator directly with the information you have provided, they can still use that information to adjudicate whether to ensure that the violator cannot attend the conference again, or cannot speak at the conference.

If you would like us to address the violator, the outcome for them might be a discussion, an ejection from the conference, or a lifetime ban. Ejections do not come with a refund for the conference.